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Sunday, November 20, 2016

Most of the
folks we know have opted for a quiet Thanksgiving at home, with immediate
family, or the recent marketing ploy of Friendsgiving with like-minded
individuals. There are still many others who live by a set of traditions that
demand they spend the day with family (parents, in-laws, siblings). And if
Facebook is any indication, the fracturing of America went far deeper than party
lines.

Some
families are still feeling the push and pull, and they are so possessed you half expect the turkey itself to take arms! It is for these poor souls that I
put together the Insatiable Gourmet Word
Search book.

If you get
the urge to say something you’ll regret later, go lock yourself in the
bathroom, the family room, or the bedroom with all the coats, and solve a
puzzle.

Arguing
politics with family is useless. Most of your relatives, much like your own
selves, have already made up your minds. Beyond that, your logic isn’t any
better than theirs! Everyone makes up their minds based on criteria that
affects them and makes sense to them on a very personal level.

Regime
changes in Washington affect us all, but breaking family ties over it seems a
little extreme (unless your family wants to cause you physical harm and is
using politics as a reason to justify it).

On a holiday
based around food, if you find yourself unable to talk about it, then immerse yourself
in food games that don’t require food fights!

A special
offering from Kali, The Food Goddess
the book has 25 culinary-themed puzzles based on cookbook categories, and is designed
for discerning foodies. Some of the puzzle categories include sandwiches, sushi,
pasta, herbs & spices, and aphrodisiacs.

The little
book is available right now at CreateSpace and Amazon, just in time for the
holidays (whether yours will be happy or an uncomfortable mess)!

For Your Consideration

On a serious
note, I hope you get the puzzle book and enjoy the momentary escape, but I urge
you to maintain your principles and also respect that not everyone has to agree
with you. Let politics slide with family and try to enjoy each other for as
long as the universe permits you the privilege and pleasure. Pick up your
political fight back in January! Fight the good fight, but practice empathy and
tolerance until then. It’ll be a gift to the world and a fantastic example to set
for the younger set. Don't go guerilla on your family until there is an actual revolution--these people are not your enemy.

Merely three days after the
election, I am physically exhausted and emotionally spent again.

I try not to write out of anguish. I leave that
to the young and idealistic. I’ve boomeranged past jaded at this point.

People are screaming and
demanding to be heard but nobody is listening to one another. Neither side
seems capable of making concessions for each other. The mere concept of
compromise seems offensive, as if meeting in the middle was akin to selling
out.

But this constant pull from
opposite extremes is not healthy. Don’t people realize that the center cannot
hold that way? And the center here is the difference between the rise and fall.

I wanted to write this
November. I wanted to focus on creativity, on a world different from ours but
oddly familiar, to flesh out these quirky characters… I still could, but I am not
feeling it.

What I feel is tense and
disappointed (not in the outcome so much as in the aftermath).

What the winning side doesn’t
understand right now, is that the other side is cringing in the same way we all
have when a large, ham-fisted nurse has come towards us with a fake smile and a
giant syringe and lied, “This is going to sting a little.”

No, it’s going to hurt like hell, you bastard, and it will
sting for a long time afterwards; may your tongue rot in your mouth for lying!

People are terrified that
their rights will be trampled and when you threaten their basic needs (and we
all agree that human rights are basic), people freak out.

We are about to be ruled by
people who believe women have no place in deciding anything about their own bodies; people who believe you can electric shock the gay out; people who
advocate a return to internment camps and who want to reinstitute the Committee
for Un-American Activities (one of the most shameful episodes in our shared
history full of savage racism and abuse of power)… It’s little things like that
people are freaking out about.

Are people preempting the
crisis? Perhaps, but just because it is an emotional response doesn’t mean that
it isn’t steeped in some educated guesses. On the other hand, I have no respect
for those who immediately resort to rioting and violence. That destroys your
credibility and makes others not wish to listen, adding to the dysfunction.

And speaking of
dysfunction, just as I was afraid earlier this year, friendships have ended,
family relations have fractured, and some of these may never recover. That is
so incredibly sad to me. Why can we no
longer agree to disagree and remain civil?

So, I’d rather write, but I
cannot focus right now because I feel I am living inside Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” without the breathless lyrical beauty. And without the beauty all that is left is gallows
humor and horror… I can't create under these circumstances, I need literal escape to lyrical escape!

Monday, October 17, 2016

Halloween is coming—a small
consolation in view of the political climate that permeates everything!

I’ll give you a free
single, to read in one quick seating. Just to get you hankering for Halloween,
you can become acquainted with The
Haunted Kitty. For a few minutes,
you can cleanse your palate of the ugliness our presidential election is
leaving in everybody’s mouth (on both sides). Clear your head of insults and
innuendo, and outlandish promises and lies!

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Among the many things that may be said about 2016, the
most hellish is we have been subjected to several heatwaves—endless days,
stretching into weeks, of heat indexes in the three-digits. Heat and humidity
rose to almost inhuman levels of discomfort, trying to kill us…

This has made it difficult to breathe, to move, to think!
Creativity takes a back seat to the deep moan your soul lets out hoping the
heat – or you – will break and make it stop.

That’s life without air conditioner. I do not recommend
it.

As much as Mother Nature has tried to knock us down and
leave us gasping for air like beached whales, in between “spritzing” I have tried
to work on two things: learning how to manipulate images and strip them into
line art, and rekindling my love of drawing.

Right now, I am just practicing drawing and doodling on my
tablet. Reacquainting myself with lines and forms, etc.

Ultimately, I want to do the equivalent of an
illuminated manuscript as well as a coloring book. Or ice cream, ultimately I want ice cream (that may be heatstroke speaking).

I have no topics in mind right at this moment, but this
is a long run goal. The final product could be a cookbook as easily as it may be
a children’s picture book.

I still have a translation to finish, a fantasy novella
to edit, a collection of stories to complete. None of these things will get
done as my brain is half mush. I need to save the lucid moments in between
misery for paying jobs.

Of course, I’m half joking. My brain is not a slushie,
it just feels that way occasionally (you know, like July and August). It does affect your motivation when you
spend a better part of your day trying to find ways to cool off--your creativity is taken over by such serious choices as "put head in freezer," "shower, again?" or "more ice cream!"

All that is left for us to do is to just outlast summer,
cruel and unyielding as it has been, and fall into the loving embrace of autumn
as soon as it reaches us.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

The last few weeks I have
been trying to portray what I thought would be a simple scene: a woman makes
lunch for her long-lost childhood sweetheart, his wife and their daughter.

The problem is that as I
write the scene and let it unravel, there is so much resentment in the room it
is almost stifling!

Having lived through similar situations (not in the details
but in the aggregate), it is painful to write. You relive the horror and find
yourself trying to put distance between your soul and the written page…

There is a push/pull thing
going with the mother and daughter, trust issues with the husband and wife, old
wounds between the man and his old friend, and the natural nervousness of
entering a new situation (meeting new people and meeting your past).

The struggle is in how to
write the scene so that I show the
different dynamics, and how I let the narrator express what is happening without
copping an attitude and taking sides. But then, the idea of an unreliable narrator
that has an agenda is so much more fun!

I keep writing and have a mélange
of color on the page as each version reveals itself and awaits cohesion. I don’t mind the chaos. In fact, I
find it refreshing to deal with a narrator that has more gossip than journalist
running through her.

As a writer, you do not
want to detract from the story itself. At the same time, you want your reader
to enjoy the story. I think this narrator can add color commentary that the
characters cannot make themselves, and point out some ridiculous moments that happen in life but,
unless you have an active inner voice, they never get called out properly.

Because a story may be
worth reading if it includes the words, “And
girl, you will never guess what she got caught doing in that bathroom—well, it was only cause
they heard the crash and her cussin’ and taking the Lord’s name in vain!” It will always be much better than telling it with clinical detachment.

Just as one starts to play up with the narrator, you realize the story could be funny in the telling if not in its own reality. That changes the telling and makes the process a little nuanced; and the writing that had gotten wooden and convoluted, suddenly is fresh and full of possibilities... Nothing is written in stone: changing the tone of your story does not change the events. When stuck, maybe letting the narrator set the pace might help advance the story in unexpected (and delightful) ways.

Monday, June 27, 2016

People can
easily break your heart because they don’t live to meet your expectations of
them. People don’t live toeing the line that you call “standards”. People do
not take actions based on how it may affect you or your feelings.

People do as
they feel they must – sometimes to their own detriment – and the consequences
are so far down the line of things to consider that they are almost
non-existent.

This is why
most people get a look that screams, “Mistaken identity!” when you proclaim
they have broken your heart. They have no idea how anything concerned with them
and them alone could possibly affect you.

It’s not
that you don’t matter; it’s that they never even considered it.

Of course,
it’s easier to believe that the offender is an unfeeling bastard, an ass, or a
sociopath. But every story has more than one side… Remember the old adage that
for every story there is your side, their side, and the truth.

Because you
ascribe great things to a person, based on the potential you see in them, does
not in any way motivate their actions nor guide their conscience. Your hopes
and aspirations for others do not fuel their morality or their sense of being.

The next
time your heart is broken, remember this. Remember that you were barely a
consideration in the outcome. It won’t hurt any less. The disappointment will
not lessen. In fact, it will isolate you in your grieving…

Why remind
you of this then?

People will
disappoint you. Cry if you must. Feel it, but move on. You have very little to
do with it, and are likely to have very little to affect a rehabilitation.

When, and
if, you become a determining factor in that other person’s decision to live
ethically; then be prepared to accept or decline your role (there will be
expectations of you). Otherwise, it’s every man for himself.

I know it
sounds stone cold bitchy! It is not. The reality is that we as a people are a
community only as long as we need each other, but we live and die deep within
our own skins. Giving and freely sharing of ourselves takes extraordinary
efforts and most people are not willing to sacrifice their “individuality” in
the pursuit of sparing hurting your feelings.

The writer
in me needs to say that one of you disappointed me. Deeply. When I write about
it, it will be raw and broken and unforgiving—but it will likely be honest and heartbreaking
(those two often go hand-in-hand).

Writers
quilt the broken pieces of life and put together art that comforts or
confronts. The love--bruises and tears and all--remains but does not affect the
storytelling. The story just is.

And so,
history simply repeats itself: people will disappoint you, and writers write.

Friday, May 13, 2016

Politics in America are turning into an interesting
amalgamation of theater and storytelling. This particular national election
cycle has elements of circus and reality television: bizarre and postmodern,
apocalyptic and revolutionary…

This presidential election is both Dada and
anti-Dadaist.

Clearly, logic and reason are rejected outright; and the
critical prize is who can meme out a narrative that is the most entertaining or
inciting.

Forget about not being in Kansas anymore. Culturally, we
have broken the mold of everything we used to be and are entering a completely
new ball game.

If this were happening in some tiny island in the middle
of nowhere, we’d be bored with it in a day or two of itinerant coverage (“Oh
those [fill in the backward culture here]!”). The problem is that we are one of
the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful nations on the planet, and what
happens in the USA truly affects the rest of the world.

Extrapolating the possibilities from the choices before
us, in a historical context, turns out to be depressing and horrifying. On the
other hand, narcotizing ourselves and letting our subconscious pick up
parallels to Stephen King or other dystopian stories seems far safer.

It’s easy to ignore it when even your inner child is
running around in your head, screaming, “We’re all going diiiiiie! Doomed. We’re
doomed!!!”

If you step back, you can see some camps spinning their unique
narrative; while others are expertly creating an intricate web for a larger
(dare we say, epic) story.

Many have theorized that life is but a dream—an idiot’s
dream. But this feels more like television than any dream I’ve ever had…
everything happening now is the marketing for the launch of the world’s biggest
reality television show ever.

I remember people being infuriated when St.
Elsewhere ended their triumphant six-season run on network television
by suggesting that the entire thing had been nothing but the musings trapped
inside the head of a small autistic boy playing with a snow globe.

What if we’re nothing more than the musings of an
anarchist stoner’s moribund dreams as he overdoses in some rat-infested dark
alley somewhere?

But what if it's worse than that? What if
P.T. Barnum was the Second Coming and this is the ending we all deserve?